Randi restored

Youtube has restored the JREF account.

I’m going to have to disagree with Randi, though. Responding to a violation by automatically yanking the whole account is not appropriate and civilized behavior, especially when it can be resolved by an amicable communication. How about communicating first, and then yanking if someone is intransigent? The problem is that not everyone has the resources or the clout of the JREF, and there have been far too many cases of individuals getting shut down on entirely bogus complaints.

ABC thinks we’re all morons

Who knows? Maybe they’re right. They’re planning a program for “Nightline” (which, I seem to recall, at least used to be a pretty good news program) which will probably get them some decent ratings.

They’re going to have a debate on the existence of Satan.

Yeah, you heard that right…on a so-called news program. But it gets worse! They have 4 people coming on to yell at each other.

On the “Satan exists!” side, they have Pastor Mark Driscoll, head of a megachurch in Seattle, and Annie Lobert, former prostitute and founder of a group called Hookers for Jesus. Sensationalism is already rearing its gaudy head, you can tell.

Even worse, the “Satan does not exist!” side is a joke. It consists of Bishop Carlton Pearson, who doesn’t accept the doctrine of hell but is a Christian, and…unbelievably…Deepak Chopra. Not an atheist or skeptic among them, just hardcore believers in woo vs. fluffy believers in woo.

Don’t tune in. It will be a complete waste of time.

The woo, it burns!

Does only Orac get to give you a Friday dose of woo? Because I have to show you this amazing and all-too-common bit of criminal quackery.

God’s Answer To Cancer:

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Just kill it by using this health machine to flood your cells with “Chi” Energy!

You should read the long, rambling testimonial on that web page — it says absolutely nothing about how this gadget is supposed to “zap disease germs”, but it does go through a laundry list of quack therapies, and heaps scorn on other quacks who sell gadgets that cure cancer.

I’m rather dazzled by the quantity of nonsense all on display there: it’s got the New Age + Traditional Chinese Medicine combo of “chi”, it’s tying it all in to God magic, and of course, it’s got the high-tech pseudoscientific dependence on a box with bits of a Radio Shack voltmeter.

An honest admission from Senator Harkin

Democratic Senator Tom Harkin is the pol who pushed a major “alternative medicine” proposal through congress that led to the formation of the NCCAM, a hotbed of government-sponsored quackery. He now regrets the effort, but for all the wrong reasons. It’s hard to imagine a more damning statement that reveals an utter ignorance of how science should work than this one:

Sen. Tom Harkin, the proud father of the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, told a Senate hearing on Thursday that NCCAM had disappointed him by disproving too many alternative therapies.

“One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short,” Harkin said.

The senator went on to lament that, since its inception in 1998, the focus of NCCAM has been “disproving things rather than seeking out and approving things.”

Skeptics have complained all along that Harkin and his allies founded this office to promote alternative therapies at public expense, not to test them scientifically. Harkin’s statement at the hearing explicitly confirms that hypothesis.

He’s unhappy because the research didn’t give him the answer he wanted. Does he think science is a magic wishing well?

Maybe we need to establish a new political party, the Rationalists, to replace both the Democrats and Republicans. It would be a wonderful idea, but I fear it would never get more than 0.001% of the American vote.

Maybe we’d get better answers if we polled ghosts

It’s been a while since we had a pointless poll…so here’s a light snack to nibble on. We are asked, “The best evidence for an afterlife is from…“, and the answer so far is:

Mediums
3% (20 votes)
Near-death experiences
26% (147 votes)
Reincarnation memories
15% (86 votes)
Ghosts
5% (29 votes)
EVP and similar
3% (19 votes)
Crisis apparitions
2% (14 votes)
All equal
11% (64 votes)
Other
7% (41 votes)
There is no evidence
27% (156 votes)

I don’t get the popularity of the NDE “evidence”. I had a friend once who told me that he had the most awesome experience on ‘shrooms — he’d melted into a purple puddle that soaked into the earth, and he had spiritual sex with tree roots. I’m pretty sure that didn’t actually happen, and I wouldn’t use it to argue that human beings were capable of phase changes into a fluid state or that intimate congress with plants was fun and rewarding, but people use the same logic all the time in arguing that while they were in a brain-damaged state, befuddled by anoxia, their perception of the hallucinatory state afterwards is evidence that there is a heaven.

I have no idea what “crisis apparitions” are. I don’t care to know either.

I have heard of EVPs — they’re all the rage right now thanks to all those horrible ‘ghosthunter’ shows on TV. Leave a tape recorder running in an empty room, then play it back with lots of amplification of the background hiss and crackle of noise. If you are gullible and really want to believe, you will hear random splutters that you can imagine are sort of voices. And the really cool thing is that if you tell someone that this scrap of noise says something like, “Paul is dead”, then their pattern-forming circuits in their brain will impose your interpretation on the noise for you, and they’ll hear the same thing! Very convincing, I’m sure.

I voted for no evidence. If you vote otherwise, maybe you can come back here and explain your evidence to us. We need a good laugh on a Saturday morning.

Rename it to “Quackery Without Scruples”

I’ve always considered Doctors Without Borders to be a commendable, even noble, organization. So I’m a little bit shocked to see this new group capitalizing on their good name: Homeopaths Without Borders. They’ve got to be joking.

It is our main aim to transfer homeopathy to those countries, where public health care and medical supply of the people is sub-standard, for whatever reasons. Homeopathy also proves very effective in healing physical and mental injury in situations of war or political crisis.

If their health care is substandard, isn’t it rather cruel to charge in and make it worse?

Ben Goldacre is getting sued…again

Lawyers must love Ben. All he has to do is speak the truth, and wham, the kooks charge in. He recently posted a clip from a radio program in which lunatic anti-vaccination nut Jeni Barnett said many stupid things, so she rushed to silence her own words. Can’t have the fact that she’s spluttering nonsense made public, of course!

It is my view that in this extended broadcast Jeni exemplifies every single canard ever uttered by the antivaccination movement. “It’s a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry.” “Science always changes so you can believe what you like.” “It’s a debate and a controversy.” “Measles was never that bad anyway.” “Immune systems are damaged by being understimulated.” “Immune systems are damaged by being overstimulated.” And so on.

The clip has been taken down from Goldacre’s site while the lawyers frolic, but this is the internet: it’s still available elsewhere. I recommend that more of us download a copy and keep it handy. Barnett is only going to succeed in disseminating her own indictment ever further.

Even better: Science Punk and a network of bloggers have partial clips and transcripts of the silly show. Watch the net route around lawyer-induced damage and keep the information flowing!